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December 2012

Monday, 31 December 2012

... I don't see the harm in adding more fictions to the
hypotheticals. Given that the opposition's evidence is the "millions" of
home-invasions that've been thwarted yearly, or most probably even
hourly, by gun-savvy Common People Who Love The Constitution More Than
Dirty Liberals Do, I don't see why Dirty Liberals oughta restrict
themselves to reality. And so:

Thursday, 20 December 2012

You are standing in an open field west of a white apartment complex, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.

> go home

You turn to your left and find yourself at an airport. The line of weary parents and unsupervised children snakes around the airport twice.

> stand line

You find the first available line and deposit yourself and your luggage at the end of it. In front of you is a college student of indeterminate age with suspect hygiene. To your right is an incontinent child.

> ignore

You are unable to ignore the stale sweat with its hints of Adderall and vodka. The child to your right is making a face.

> stop face

You grab the child by the face. Its father lunges at you. He is carrying the child, a camera case, a man-purse, a laptop bag, a carry-on, three large suitcases, his wife's hat and two pairs of sunglasses.

> fuck him

Are you sure you want to do that here?

> fine punch dad

You strike the father in the face and make contact with one pair of sunglasses, a camera case, a carry-on, one large suitcase and his wife's hat. The child resumes making a face.

> stop face

You grab the child by the face. Its mother lunges at you. She is carrying a copy of 50 Shades of Grey, a lady-purse, a child's car-seat and a pet-carrier containing a small yapping animal.

> kick mom

You kick the mother in her lady-purse. She throws 50 Shades of Grey at your head but it strikes the unkempt college student in his. As he turns around she drops the pet-carrier and looses the small yapping animal. The family chases after it as screams of "Rat! Rat!" echo through the terminal.

> cut in line

You occupy the place vacated by the family. A few of your fellows-in-line shoot you disapproving looks but they are too demoralized to care. Five hours later you reach the ticket counter and receive your boarding pass.

> bout fucking time

There is no one here for you to fuck. You walk to your gate and await the initiation of boarding procedures. Hours pass. Centuries. Kingdoms rise and fall. Great men are born and die alone on sodden streets. Women are elected to offices higher and highest. Hot coffee spills from your tilted cup onto your most sensitive parts.

> GET IT OFF

The coffee has soaked through your boxers and threatens to weld them to your skin. Your favorite bits will never work again.

> JUST A DREAM

This is no dream.

> JUST A DREAM

You are wide awake and in unimaginable pain. You begin to imagine life a life without–

> AM DREAMING AND CAN NARRATE OWN LIFE. PRECIOUS BITS ARE FINE. COMPUTER LIES.

Tuesday, 11 December 2012

Gambling man rolls the dice, working man pays the bill.
It’s still fat and easy up on banker’s hill.

They “rage at corporate oligarchy and economic injustice,” things at which I’m raging too, so I completely understand why Rolling Stone
would think they’re good: it agrees with them. There’s only one
problem: they’re not. The state of political rhetoric is such that
feeble statements of solidarity pass for insight. We’ve traded genius
for blandished agreement, resulting in a situation in which we praise
people for writing:

There ain’t no help.
The cavalry stayed home.

I wouldn’t be complaining were it not for the fact that, of all people, it’s Springsteen
they’re praising for rehashing tired polemic. Because part of the
reason I’m lefter than I’ve any right to be is that this same
Springsteen fellow once made me feel the anger and hopelessness
to which he only here alludes. If you’ve never seen the debut
performance of “The River,” do yourself a favor and do so right now. I can wait.

Granted, “The River” isn’t an explicitly political song–it’s
decidedly lacking in policy statements–but it’s a far more compelling
vision of what lives are like “on account of the economy” than the
broadsides found on Wrecking Ball. Let’s start with the titular
and abiding image: a river. What are rivers like? To trade one bard for
another, here’s John McPhee on the Mississippi in his “Atchafalaya“:

Southern Louisiana exists in its present form because the
Mississippi River has jumped here and there within an arc about two
hundred miles wide, like a pianist playing with one hand—frequently and
radically changing course, surging over the left or the right bank to
go off in utterly new directions. Always it is the river’s purpose to
get to the Gulf by the shortest and steepest gradient. As the mouth
advances southward and the river lengthens, the gradient declines, the
current slows, and sediment builds up the bed. Eventually, it builds up
so much that the river spills to one side. Major shifts of that nature
have tended to occur roughly once a millennium. The Mississippi’s main
channel of three thousand years ago is now the quiet water of Bayou
Teche, which mimics the shape of the Mississippi. Along Bayou Teche, on
the high ground of ancient natural levees, are Jeanerette, Breaux
Bridge, Broussard, Olivier—arcuate strings of Cajun towns. Eight hundred
years before the birth of Christ, the channel was captured from the
east. It shifted abruptly and flowed in that direction for about a
thousand years. In the second century a.d., it was captured again, and
taken south, by the now unprepossessing Bayou Lafourche, which, by the
year 1000, was losing its hegemony to the river’s present course,
through the region that would be known as Plaquemines. By the
nineteen-fifties, the Mississippi River had advanced so far past New
Orleans and out into the Gulf that it was about to shift again, and its
offspring Atchafalaya was ready to receive it.

The point being that rivers are forces of nature that even the Army
Corps of Engineers can only control until the occasional Katrina. Going
“down to the river,” as Springsteen’s narrator and compatriots do, is
the contemporary equivalent of worshiping a mountain on account of its
orogeny. It’s there and demands homage and besides where else are you going to go when that thing is there? The song begins with an idyllic, if limited, vision of life in America:

I come from down in the valley
where, Mister, when you’re young.
They bring you up to do, like your daddy done.
Me and Mary we met in high school,
When she was just seventeen.
We’d ride out of that valley, down to where the fields were green

That valley could be any valley, and the adjacent fields could be
that green almost anywhere. There’s a little disillusioned defiance with
the interjected “Mister,” letting you know that the tone of what
follows is going to be a little belligerent. (You don’t “Mister” someone
unless dudgeon’s on the rise.) Meaning that we have an annoyed narrator
from a pastoral place, but at this point we have no idea why he’s
annoyed. What did they do “[w]hen she was just seventeen”?

We’d go down to the river
And into the river we’d dive.
Oh, down to the river we’d ride

That’s the stuff of memories: he has his “Mary,” his “valley,” his
“fields,” and he spent his time going “down to the river” and “div[ing]”
in. Are we sure Mary’s name isn’t actually “Huck”?

Then I got Mary pregnant

We’re sure. But what happens to this little slice of an ideologically
appealing America when Mary gets pregnant? I bet her nuclear family
swarmed her with loving support and arranged a dream wedding and

Man, that was all she wrote.
And for my nineteenth birthday, I got a union card and a wedding coat.
We went down to the courthouse,
And the judge put it all to rest.
No wedding day smiles, no walk down the aisle,
No flowers, no wedding dress.

What happened to America, Man? Who exactly are you, Mister? In the
space of two verses, Springsteen transformed America from an
advertisement for the Shenandoah Valley into the urban pit in which
affect scuttles to die. This verse begins with angry conjunctions:
birthdays, which are supposed to be happy occasions, are conjoined by
comma to a conjunctive clause whose necessity seems as unnecessary as
the alliteration in this sentence, “a union card and a wedding coat.”
That “and” there is deceptively correlative, as Springsteen’s delivery
of the lyric hammers home: the narrator “got a union card and a wedding coat.”
The vehemence that begins with the “and” encompasses the “wedding coat”
in a way that makes it clear that the narrator resents the enforced
necessity of this particular conjunction. Not that anything can be done
about it. The flat affect Springsteen brings to the rest of the verse
communicates that clearly: from “wedding coat” on his delivery is as
listless as a trial transcript, and rightly so, since the narrator
and Mary went “down to the courthouse,” where a “judge put it all to
rest.” But what does that even mean?

The OED informs me that, by “put[ting] it all to rest,” the
judge either “dispelled [their] fears” or “settled something (so as to
be free of it).” Only he didn’t do either. The “something” that’s been
“settled” here is amorphous mess of adolescent emotion that settles
about as well as a biscuit cut from wet batter. It keeps its shape so
long as it’s in the mold, but place it on a sheet and its edges bleed
until its original form can’t be fathomed from the slop. That’s what
marriage as a social convention is for: preventing the slop. But the
narrator and Mary don’t experience marriage as a social convention so
much as a bureaucratic one. Moreover, their ceremony is literally
defined by the attributes it lacked: the “wedding day smiles,” “walk[s]
down the aisle,” “flowers,” and “wedding dress[es]” to which the cruel
world has said “No,” “no,” “No” and “no.” How does the couple celebrate
this sterile occasion?

That night we went down to the river,
And into the river we dived.
Oh, down to the river, we did ride.

Of course they did. Except notice the difference between the first
iteration of the chorus and this one. In the first, they “[would] go
down to the river,” and “into the river [they would] dive,” and even
though the contracted “would” marks the past tense, it’s expansive, in
that it refers to multiple occasions in which they rode down and dove
into the river. The openness of the phrasing is nostalgic. But the
second time it comes around, the chorus refers to a specific time and
ride and dive: their wedding night, which they marked by doing what
they’d always done, only differently, deliberately. That night they “did
ride.” Who “[does] ride” somewhere? People with a purpose “[do] ride”
somewhere. Except the narrator and Mary “did ride” to a place that isn’t
a place. (Don’t make me quote Heraclitus.)
On the night in which they bound themselves together, permanently, they
ventured out to the very image of impermanence itself: a flowing river
in whose bed nothing settles, no matter what a judge says. I’m sure
this’ll be a happy union.

Now all them things that seemed so important,
Well Mister they vanished right into the air.
Now I just act like I don’t remember,
Mary acts like she don’t care.

But at least they have their memories, right? The narrator only
“act[s] like [he] don’t remember,” and Mary only “acts like she don’t
care,” which suggests that they both actually do, which makes everything
more horrible. At least it can’t get any worse.

But I remember us riding in my brother’s car,
Her body tan and wet down at the reservoir.
At night on them banks I’d lie awake,
And pull her close just to feel each breath she’d take.

So he remembers, but the slight uptick in the tempo suggests a kind
of resurgence, as if this memory is something he draws strength from
despite the fact that “pull[ing] her close” is how his troubles started
in the first place. The tense has expanded again: the contracted “would”
no longer refers to a particular moment, but to composite memory of a
life’s worth of them. This is good, right?

Now those memories come back to haunt me,
They haunt me like a curse.
Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true,
Or is it something worse?

There is no good here. He’s not haunted by a single memory, but by a monstrous agglomeration of them. And it’s cursed.
It’s not enough to double-down on the verb “haunt” in a repetitious
construction that’s structured like a confession, these memories must
“haunt [him] like a curse.” Which makes no sense, because curses don’t
“haunt” people, they “follow” them. Unless, of course, these memories
are just a dream, and that dream is just a lie that didn’t come true, in
which case the curse is something worse. Therein lies the power of this
lyric. It begins understandably enough, with memories haunting the
narrator, but then the memories turn into a curse; then the narrator
asks someone, presumably the “Mister” to whom the song’s addressed, a
simple-sounding question that leads into a conceptual quagmire of
horribleness. I could diagram that question for you, but it wouldn’t
help because, fundamentally, it doesn’t make any sense. It evokes a
state of confused desperation instead of detailing the circumstances of
it, much like the monster in a horror film that’s far scarier when its
figure is implied than when it appears on screen.

And as for that beacon of hope, the river? The narrator still goes
down to it, “though [he] know[s] the river is dry.” His life has become
an empty gesture of defiance. Why? On account of the economy.
It’s a single phrase in a song whose power emanates from elsewhere, and
yet it resonates far more soundly than “[i]t’s still fat and easy up on
banker’s hill.” Those who already agree with Springsteen will applaud
him for that line. But people—ideology be damned—who listen to “The
River”?